On the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht on Wednesday, the Holocaust Museum of Porto in partnership with the European Jewish Association marked the International Day against Fascism and Antisemitism by inviting some 1,500 school students to commemorate the historic date.
The students, who came from schools all over Portugal, visited an exhibition on the subject curated by Dr Michael Rothwell, whose family fell victim to Nazi atrocities that night, when all the windows of his grandfather’s shoe store were violently smashed.
The Holocaust Museum presented a program that included a guided tour of the Modern Antisemitism Room, which shows the growth of antisemitism in Portugal between 2015 and 2022, and a screening of the film “Sefarad” that recounts the story of the “Portuguese Dreyfus” Captain Barros Basto, who was expelled from the army because he was a Jew.
The teenagers also lit a flame in the museum’s Memorial Room with the names of tens of thousands of people murdered.
The Porto Holocaust Museum has cooperation agreements with hundreds of schools across the country and receives around 40,000 children a year.
Gabriel Senderowicz, president of Porto’s Jewish community, said: “In many countries, Jews don’t count. Indeed, they are not among the minorities to be protected, because they are seen as ‘white,’ rich plutocrats with their own state in Israel. Currently, antisemitism in Europe is the rejection of Jewish people, Jewish principles, synagogue Jews, business Jews, and all Jews who are not fully converted to modernism.”
The European Union, determined to curb increasing antisemitism in the continent, unveiled its Strategy on Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life (2021-2030) in October of last year. It is an ambitious, multistep strategy that aims to prevent and combat all forms of antisemitism, to foster and protect Jewish lives, and to educate and research Holocaust remembrance.
Senderowicz said: “The EU will certainly manage to promote the return of the Jewish people, their culture and religion. However, as soon as Jewish communities start making a strong mark in European territory, the antisemites in society will attempt to destroy Jewish life bit by bit, using the same myths and methods employed in the past,”
Students look at pictures in the Holocaust Museum of Porto, November 9, 2022
The Statista Research Department found that since the turn of the century there has been an increase in the number of violent antisemitic incidents worldwide. In a 2018 survey of antisemitism in Europe, the majority of respondents in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and France thought that antisemitism had increased in the past five years. All these countries, with the addition of Italy, Belgium and the UK, also saw a majority of people say that their country had a problem with holocaust denial.
A study commissioned by the European Commission and conducted by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), showed that between the first two months of 2020 and the first two of 2021, there was a seven-fold increase in antisemitic content on social media in French, and a thirteen-fold increase in antisemitic content in German.
Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi party’s SA and SS paramilitary forces along with the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on November 9-10, 1938.
Its name is derived from the many shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.
It is viewed as the prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
